Choosing a song to learn
You are now fully equipped to start tackling full songs for (presumably) the first time. But before you do, you might want to consider a few things first. To begin with, you don't want to bite off more than you can chew. Start with an easy song. Try to find a song that you like that you think sounds pretty easy to play. You can even try figuring it out on your own if you want. If you don't want to spend the time doing that, though, you can simply look it up on the Internet by searching for tabs to that song.
I have a few suggestions for choosing a good beginner song. If you want to get better at guitar, you'll need to start here. Any song you choose early on should have several of these characteristics:
- Find a song with basic chords. Try to stick to the chords you learned about on this Web site. I wouldn't recommend diving right into A7sus4's and Fm7's quite yet — more than likely, you'll just end up frustrated.
- Try to get a mix of barred chords and open chords if you can. While this isn't of utmost importance, you'll be killing two birds with one stone if you are practicing a song that makes you bar chords. Believe me, this takes practice to get used to.
- Pick a song that you really like or are really interested in. That way, you'll not only have a stronger desire to master it, but you'll also be pretty familiar with it to begin with.
- See if you can find a song that makes you do a little bit of easy picking. This will help your control with the pick.
- Don't give up on it when it's "good enough." Keep practicing it until you've got it down exactly how the song sounds, or at the very least, it sounds exactly how you want it to.